By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
Joel Shore, who has been questioning my climate-sensitivity calculations, just as a good skeptic should, has kindly provided at my request a reference to a paper by Dr. Andrew Lacis and others at the Goddard Institute of Space Studies to support his assertion that CO2 exercises about 75% of the radiative forcings from all greenhouse gases, because water vapor, the most significant greenhouse gas because of its high concentration in the atmosphere, condenses out rapidly, while the non-condensing gases, such as CO2, linger for years.
Dr. Lacis writes in a commentary on his paper: “While the non-condensing greenhouse gases account for only 25% of the total greenhouse effect, it is these non-condensing GHGs that actually control the strength of the terrestrial greenhouse effect, since the water vapor and cloud feedback contributions are not self-sustaining and, as such, only provide amplification.”
Dr. Lacis’ argument, then, is that the radiative forcing from water vapor should be treated as a feedback, because if all greenhouse gases were removed from the atmosphere most of the water vapor now in the atmosphere would condense or precipitate out within ten years, and within 50 years global temperatures would be some 21 K colder than the present.
I have many concerns about this paper, which – for instance – takes no account of the fact that evaporation from the surface occurs at thrice the rate imagined by computer models (Wentz et al., 2007). So there would be a good deal more water vapor in the atmosphere even without greenhouse gases than the models assume.
The paper also says the atmospheric residence time of CO2 is “measured in thousands of years”. Even the IPCC, prone to exaggeration as it is, puts the residence time at 50-200 years. On notice I can cite three dozen papers dating back to Revelle in the 1950s that find the CO2 residence time to be just seven years, though Professor Lindzen says that for various reasons 40 years is a good central estimate.
Furthermore, it is questionable whether the nakedly political paragraph with which the paper ends should have been included in what is supposed to be an impartial scientific analysis. To assert without evidence that beyond 300-350 ppmv CO2 concentration “dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system would exceed the 25% risk tolerance for impending degradation of land and ocean ecosystems, sea-level rise [at just 2 inches per century over the past eight years, according to Envisat], and inevitable disruption of socioeconomic and food-producing infrastructure” is not merely unsupported and accordingly unscientific: it is rankly political.
One realizes that many of the scientists at GISS belong to a particular political faction, and that at least one of them used to make regular and substantial donations to Al Gore’s re-election campaigns, but learned journals are not the place for über-Left politics.
My chief concern, though, is that the central argument in the paper is in effect a petitio principii – a circular and accordingly invalid argument in which one of the premises – that feedbacks are strongly net-positive, greatly amplifying the warming triggered by a radiative forcing – is also the conclusion.
The paper turns out to be based not on measurement, observation and the application of established theory to the results but – you guessed it – on playing with a notorious computer model of the climate: Giss ModelE. The model, in effect, assumes very large net-positive feedbacks for which there is precious little reliable empirical or theoretical evidence.
At the time when Dr. Lacis’ paper was written, ModelE contained “flux adjustments” (in plain English, fudge-factors) amounting to some 50 Watts per square meter, many times the magnitude of the rather small forcing that we are capable of exerting on the climate.
Dr. Lacis says ModelE is rooted in well-understood physical processes. If that were so, one would not expect such large fudge-factors (mentioned and quantified in the model’s operating manual) to be necessary.
Also, one would expect the predictive capacity of this and other models to be a great deal more successful than it has proven to be. As the formidable Dr. John Christy of NASA has written recently, in the satellite era (most of which in any event coincides with the natural warming phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation) temperatures have been rising at a rate between a quarter and a half of the rate that models such as ModelE have been predicting.
It will be helpful to introduce a little elementary climatological physics at this point – nothing too difficult (otherwise I wouldn’t understand it). I propose to apply the IPCC/GISS central estimates of forcing, feedbacks, and warming to what has actually been observed or inferred in the period since 1750.
Let us start with the forcings. Dr. Blasing and his colleagues at the Carbon Dioxide Information and Analysis Center have recently determined that total greenhouse-gas forcings since 1750 are 3.1 Watts per square meter.
From this value, using the IPCC’s table of forcings, we must deduct 35%, or 1.1 Watts per square meter, to allow for negative anthropogenic forcings, notably the particles of soot that act as tiny parasols sheltering us from the Sun. Net anthropogenic forcings since 1750, therefore, are 2 Watts per square meter.
We multiply 2 Watts per square meter by the pre-feedback climate-sensitivity parameter 0.313 Kelvin per Watt per square meter, so as to obtain warming of 0.6 K before any feedbacks have operated.
Next, we apply the IPCC’s implicit centennial-scale feedback factor 1.6 (not the equilibrium factor 2.8, because equilibrium is thousands of years off: Solomon et al., 2009).
Accordingly, after all feedbacks over the period have operated, a central estimate of the warming predicted by ModelE and other models favored by the IPCC is 1.0 K.
We verify that the centennial-scale feedback factor 1.6, implicit rather than explicit (like so much else) in the IPCC’s reports, is appropriate by noting that 1 K of warming divided by 2 Watts per square meter of original forcing is 0.5 Kelvin per Watt per square meter, which is indeed the transient-sensitivity parameter for centennial-scale analyses that is implicit (again, not explicit: it’s almost as though They don’t want us to check stuff) in each of the IPCC’s six CO2 emissions scenarios and also in their mean.
Dr. Lacis’ paper is saying, in effect, that 80% of the forcing from all greenhouse gases is attributable to CO2. The IPCC’s current implicit central estimate, again in all six scenarios and in their mean, is in the same ballpark, at 70%.
However, using the IPCC’s own forcing function for CO2, 5.35 times the natural logarithm of (390 ppmv / 280 ppmv), respectively the perturbed and unperturbed concentrations of CO2 over the period of study, is 1.8 Watts per square meter.
Multiply this by the IPCC’s transient-sensitivity factor 0.5 and one gets 0.9 K – which, however, is the whole of the actual warming that has occurred since 1750. What about the 20-30% of warming contributed by the other greenhouse gases? That is an indication that the CO2 forcing may have been somewhat exaggerated.
The IPCC, in its 2007 report, says no more than that between half and all of the warming observed since 1950 (and, in effect, since 1750) is attributable to us. Therefore, 0.45-0.9 K of observed warming is attributable to us. Even taking the higher value, if we use the IPCC/GISS parameter values and methods CO2 accounts not for 70-80% of observed warming over the period but for all of it.
In response to points like this, the usual, tired deus ex machina winched creakingly onstage by the IPCC’s perhaps too-unquestioning adherents is that the missing warming is playing hide-and-seek with us, lurking furtively at the bottom of the oceans waiting to pounce. However, elementary thermodynamic considerations indicate that such notions must be nonsense.
None of this tells us how big feedbacks really are – merely what the IPCC imagines them to be. Unless one posits very high net-positive feedbacks, one cannot create a climate problem. Indeed, even with the unrealistically high feedbacks imagined by the IPCC, there is not a climate problem at all, as I shall now demonstrate.
Though the IPCC at last makes explicit its estimate of the equilibrium climate sensitivity parameter (albeit that it is in a confused footnote on page 631 of the 2007 report), it is not explicit about the transient-sensitivity parameter – and it is the latter, not the former, that will be policy-relevant over the next few centuries.
So, even though we have reason to suspect there is a not insignificant exaggeration of predicted warming inherent in the IPCC’s predictions (or “projections”, as it coyly calls them), and a still greater exaggeration in Giss ModelE, let us apply their central estimates – without argument at this stage – to what is foreseeable this century.
The IPCC tells us that each of the six emissions scenarios is of equal validity. That means we may legitimately average them. Let us do so. Then the CO2 concentration in 2100 will be 712 ppmv compared with 392 ppmv today. So the CO2 forcing will be 5.35 ln(712/392), or 3.2 Watts per square meter, which we divide by 0.75 (the average of the GISS and IPCC estimates of the proportion of total greenhouse forcings represented by CO2) to allow for the other greenhouse gases, making 4.25 Watts per square meter.
We reduce this value by about 35% to allow for negative forcings from our soot-parasols etc., giving 2.75 Watts per square meter of net anthropogenic forcings between now and 2100.
Nest, multiply by the centennial-scale transient-sensitivity parameter 0.5 Kelvin per Watt per square meter. This gives us a reasonable central estimate of the warming to be expected by 2100 if we follow the IPCC’s and GISS’ methods and values every step of the way. And the warming we should expect this century if we do things their way? Well, it’s not quite 1.4 K.
Now we go back to that discrepancy we noted before. The IPCC says that between half and all of the warming since 1950 was our fault, and its methods and parameter values seem to give an exaggeration of some 20-30% even if we assume that all of the warming since 1950 was down to us, and a very much greater exaggeration if only half of the warming was ours.
Allowing for this exaggeration knocks back this century’s anthropogenic warming to not much more than 1 K – about a third of the 3-4 K that we normally hear so much about.
Note how artfully this tripling of the true rate of warming has been achieved, by a series of little exaggerations which, when taken together, amount to a whopper. And it is quite difficult to spot the exaggerations, not only because most of them are not all that great but also because so few of the necessary parameter values to allow anyone to spot what is going on are explicitly stated in the IPCC’s reports.
The Stern Report in 2006 took the IPCC’s central estimate of 3 K warming over the 20th century and said that the cost of not preventing that warming would be 3% of 21st-century GDP. But GDP tends to grow at 3% a year, so, even if the IPCC were right about 3 K of warming, all we’d lose over the whole century, even on Stern’s much-exaggerated costings (he has been roundly criticized for them even in the journal of which he is an editor, World Economics), would be the equivalent of the GDP growth that might be expected to occur in the year 2100 alone. That is all.
To make matters worse, Stern used an artificially low discount rate for inter-generational cost comparison which his office told me at the time was 0.1%. When he was taken apart in the peer-reviewed economic journals for using so low a discount rate, he said the economists who had criticized him were “confused”, and that he had really used 1.4%. William Nordhaus, who has written many reviewed articles critical of Stern, says that it is quite impossible to verify or to replicate any of Stern’s work because so little of the methodology is explicit and available. And how often have we heard that before? It is almost as if They don’t want us to check stuff.
The absolute minimum commercially-appropriate discount rate is equivalent to the minimum real rate of return on capital – i.e. 5%. Let us oblige Stern by assuming that he had used a 1.4% discount rate and not the 0.1% that his office told me of.
Even if the IPCC is right to try to maintain – contrary to the analysis above, indicating 1 K manmade warming this century – that we shall see 3 K warming by 2100 (progress in the first one-ninth of the century: 0 K), the cost of doing nothing about it, discounted at 5% rather than 1.4%, comes down from Stern’s 3% to just 0.5% of global 21st-century GDP.
No surprise, then, that the cost of forestalling 3 K of warming would be at least an order of magnitude greater than the cost of the climate-related damage that might arise if we just did nothing and adapted, as our species does so well.
But if the warming we cause turns out to be just 1 K by 2100, then on most analyses that gentle warming will be not merely harmless but also beneficial. There will be no net cost at all. Far from it: there will be a net economic benefit.
And that, in a nutshell, is why governments should shut down the UNFCCC and the IPCC, cut climate funding by at least nine-tenths, de-fund all but two or three computer models of the climate, and get back to addressing the real problems of the world – such as the impending energy shortage in Britain and the US because the climate-extremists and their artful nonsense have fatally delayed the building of new coal-fired and nuclear-fired power stations that are now urgently needed.
Time to get back down to Earth and use our fossil fuels, shale gas and all, to give electricity to the billions that don’t have it: for that is the fastest way to lift them out of poverty and, in so doing, painlessly to stabilize the world’s population. That would bring real environmental benefits.
And now you know why building many more power stations won’t hurt the climate, and why – even if there was a real risk of 3 K warming this century – it would be many times more cost-effective to adapt to it than to try to stop it.
As they say at Lloyds of London, “If the cost of the premium exceeds the cost of the risk, don’t insure.” And even that apophthegm presupposes that there is a risk – which in this instance there isn’t.
The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley
===========================================================
Part 1 of Sense and Sensitivity can be found here
One minor quibble: while respecting the man’s right to preserve his own heritage, his title is not his name – it has zero, zip, zilch to do with the subject matter, or his authority on the matter, and frankly looks as silly in isolation as if it were signed “Bono” or “The Artist Formerly Known as Prince”.
Re: Residence time of carbon dioxide,
Dr. Lacis’ argument,…
The paper also says the atmospheric residence time of CO2 is “measured in thousands of years”. Even the IPCC, prone to exaggeration as it is, puts the residence time at 50-200 years. On notice I can cite three dozen papers dating back to Revelle in the 1950s that find the CO2 residence time to be just seven years, though Professor Lindzen says that for various reasons 40 years is a good central estimate.
There is so much misdirection about this – the IPCC hides the figures in the bulk of the reports..
From:
http://www.rocketscientistsjournal.com/2007/06/on_why_co2_is_known_not_to_hav.html
ON WHY CO2 IS KNOWN
NOT TO HAVE ACCUMULATED IN THE ATMOSPHERE &
WHAT IS HAPPENING WITH CO2 IN THE MODERN ERA
by Jeffrey A. Glassman, PhD
For a bar chart of residence times from various papers: http://www.c3headlines.com/2009/09/the-liberal-attack-on-science-acorn-style-the-ipcc-fabrication-of-atmospheric-co2-residency-time.html
The IPCC is using deliberate misdirection because it needs to pretend that CO2 accumulates in the atmosphere when it is physically impossible, so even thousands of years gets bandied around and picked up and repeated by politicians and others as ‘well known’, and, that misdirection is in many forms and subtle and easily missed because the IPCC needs to blame it on man’s input. An example from the Glassman piece:
So clearly, the real story hidden in the IPCC is that “CO2 naturally cycles rapidly among the atmosphere, oceans and land”.
———————
Dr. Lacis says ModelE is rooted in well-understood physical processes. If that were so, one would not expect such large fudge-factors (mentioned and quantified in the model’s operating manual) to be necessary.
It will be helpful to introduce a little elementary climatological physics at this point – nothing too difficult (otherwise I wouldn’t understand it). I propose to apply the IPCC/GISS central estimates of forcing, feedbacks, and warming to what has actually been observed or inferred in the period since 1750.
What interests me is the “rooted in well-understood physical processes” – because this is where the bs begins – the misdirection is in the constant claiming, as is done with “consensus”, that the gobbledegook they then spout is “well-known physics” – when it is nothing of the kind, and actually full of properties and processes not known in the physics of our real world.
First of all – the “well-known” that carbon dioxide is well mixed and accumulates in the atmosphere for hundreds of years and so is not like the condensable water vapour is misdirection, because it isn’t physically possible, carbon dioxide is heavier than air. One and a half times heavier. Therefore, it will always displace air in the atmosphere to come down to the ground unless work is done on it, and so also will not readily rise up into the atmosphere. The AGW Science Fiction department has created a whole new fictional physics to explain this impossible claim, (I wrote something about it the other day here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/12/earths-baseline-black-body-model-a-damn-hard-problem/#comment-864575 from: [This teacher was first adamant that carbon dioxide could not separate out from the atmosphere in which it had spontaneously thoroughly mixed as per ideal gas law. ).
Also, the ‘well-mixed’ has been debunked by the AIRS data – the team, believing the misdirection from the fiction meme producing department that carbon dioxide was “well-mixed”, were shocked when they found it wasn’t, when they found it lumpy instead.
This too hides more, they haven’t released the upper and lower troposphere figures for CO2 – years of data missing from our knowledge base, and, what they have given from the mid troposphere is in difficult to access and analyse form, the couple of pictures they’ve released chosen to hide the fact that they found CO2 lumpy and not well-mixed.
So, even though a ‘non-condensing gas’, carbon dioxide isn’t a supermolecule which can defy gravity, but, is it ‘non-condensing’? In itself yes, it doesn’t go through the phase changes like water vapour to condense out into a fluid liquid from a fluid gas, but, all pure clean rainwater is carbonic acid. Water vapour and liquid and carbon dioxide have irresistible attraction for each other, water vapour will mop up any and all carbon dioxide around and as it condenses out into rain the two will come down to Earth together as rain. Also dew, fog and so on is carbonic acid. For all practical purposes, carbon dioxide is a condensing gas, because fully part of the Water Cycle.
Which brings me to the final point – the greatest misdirection here to promote AGW is to exclude the Water Cycle, as above:
higley7 says:
January 16, 2012 at 7:56 am
What is missing from this very nice discussion is the huge heat engine in the form of the convection of warm, humid air to altitude where it cools, condenses, and cool rain falls back to Earth. This is responsible for about 85% of energy transfer to altitude, away from the surface, and is the missing heat Trenberth agonizes over.
The standard figures for the cooling role of water in the water cycle is:
Earth with atmosphere as is: 15°C
Earth without any atmosphere: -18°C
Earth with atmosphere but without water: 67°C
The Water Cycle cools the Earth 52°C ! – to bring the temperature down to 15°C
No wonder they do everything they can to distract and misdirect from this!
What they do is use the final figure of 15°C, which is only achieved by the water cycle first cooling the earth, and take the difference between that and the -18°C of the Earth without any atmosphere at all, and then say the 33°C rise is due to greenhouse gases and blaming it all on carbon dioxide!
And, in saying that it ‘adds’ to water vapours warming ability they finally take eyes of the cooling property, because few notice that they’ve taken water out altogether!
So, carbon dioxide with its great affinity for water is fully part of the cooling cycle in the atmosphere. Think deserts here without the water cycle.
The misdirection is simple, but now ubiquitously promoted and so believed as “well-known”, they just keep repeating that greenhouse gases warm the atmosphere and it would be colder without them, but, they exclude water vapour in its own right and water vapour is the main greenhouse gas and water vapour cools the atmosphere. Greenhouse gases cool the atmosphere is real world physics. And carbon dioxide is fully paid up member of the cooling team.
So, there’s more background than first apparent about this claim:
Dr. Lacis’ argument, then, is that the radiative forcing from water vapor should be treated as a feedback, because if all greenhouse gases were removed from the atmosphere most of the water vapor now in the atmosphere would condense or precipitate out within ten years, and within 50 years global temperatures would be some 21 K colder than the present.”
Total junk science because devoid of any reference to real world physics, real properties and real processes.
And even worse than the Gore documentary you had a hand in debunking – this junk physics is being taught in schools, a whole generation of children who have a very confused idea about the world around them. 🙂
We see and feel a ridicule tiny part of the total spectrum and judge through that extreme nearsightedness. What if, before water falls down again, as “rain”, there is a lightnings´ storm and those drops, in falling discharge its electric charge to ground, turning from vapor into “precipitated” water. Energy is no longer “heat” there. Why being so attached to warming as to seek for only IRR? As the notes on a piano keyboard, frequencies change and manifest in many ways (they are distinctly democratic) not only as sacrosanct “heat”. Quite a fixation of the intellect it would be more proper of devils longing for its hot and lost paradise.
A particularly fascinating crop of comments here. Please forgive me if I pick out just a few to consider further here.
First, Joel Shore rightly points out that I incorrectly characterized the changes in the evaporation rate with warming that are considered in Wentz et al. (2007). However, it is worth recording that quite a simple calculation, done by Prof. Lindzen, demonstrates that the threefold greater percentage increase in evaporation per Kelvin of warming that the models predict than that which is measured indicates climate sensitivity is one-third of the IPCC’s value.
He goes on to assert, in two separate comments, that my argument was circular, in that I had assumed something about feedbacks to prove the very same thing about feedbacks. However, i had assumed nothing about feedbacks (indeed, not one of the premises even mentioned them, for the paper on which I was relying denominated its forcings in the units appropriate to forcings and not to feedbacks. So my conclusion that feedbacks were net-zero could not have been the conclusion of a circular argument. A circular argument is one in which one of the premises is identical with the conclusion. That was manifestly not the case with my argument.
Lacis’ argument, however, is circular in that the Giss ModelE assumes feedbacks are high and then declares, as an output, that they are high. In this respect, it does not matter whether the model correctly represents all relevant physical processes. In any event, we know it doesn’t, because it contains (or did at the relevant time) flux adjustments amounting to many times the tiny changes in radiation that it is trying to predict. If the model was correctly reflecting physical processes, these flux adjustments would not be necessary. Far too much reliance is placed on models, which are for many reasons simply inadequate to identify and quantify the very small changes in a very large system that are relevant to the climate sensitivity question.
Ian asks why I said Stern had predicted a 3%-of-global-GDP cost of coping with climate change, when Nordhaus had said Stern had predicted 5%. Recall that I was talking of the cost of a climate warming of 3-4 K over the 21st century, which is the IPCC’s central estimate (and which is about three times higher than it should be). Stern had said that if the warming was only 3 K this century, then the cost would be 3% of global GDP. He had also said (but this was irrelevant to my argument) that if the warming reached, say, 11 K and not 3 K in response to the CO2 doubling that will occur sometime around the end of this century, the global GDP cost could be 5-20% of GDP. Hence the 5% of GDP cited by Nordhaus.
Mr. Oldberg says I made a mistake in that I mentioned equilibrium climate sensitivity, which cannot be measured. No: I have surely made it plain enough, often enough, that all I am doing is to take the concepts and data and methods of the IPCC and its adherents and to draw logical conclusions from them. It is not necessary to agree with any of these concepts etc. to demonstrate that, even if they are true, climate sensitivity is low. If Mr. Oldberg says the notion of equilibrium climate sensitivity is a mistake, then it is the IPCC’s mistake, not mine, and he should take the matter up with the IPCC (which will probably not bother to reply).
Mr. Oldberg also raises a semantic quibble over the difference between prediction and projection. I had, however, already pointed out that the IPCC coyly calls its predictions “projections”.
R. Gates raises a query about the distinction between the transient and equilibrium responses to radiative forcings. For numerous reasons, I suspect that in reality there is little or no difference between the two, because climate feedbacks are likely to be close to net-zero or, if anything, somewhat net-negative. However, the argument in the head-post here does not depend upon agreeing or disagreeing with the IPCC on the magnitude of feedbacks. It demonstrates that, using the IPCC’s own post-feedback climate sensitivity parameter, and its own mean prediction of the CO2 concentration in 2100, the warming we can expect by then is around 1-1.4 K, not the 3.6 K that it is its mean estimate taking all six emissions scenarios into account.
And my further point in the head-post is that even if we were to see 3.6 K warming this century it would be at least an order of magnitude more cost-effective to let that warming happen and to adapt to it efficiently than to try to prevent it from happening in the first place. Indeed, that is the near-unanimous conclusion of the peer-reviewed literature in the economic field as it relates to climate, so those who say we should follow the “consensus” ought really to accept that, even if the IPCC’s science is right, doing anything now about its predictions would not merely be pointless but actively harmful to future generations, who will inherit less from us than they otherwise would because we will have squandered their inheritance on windmills, solar panels, electric autos and suchlike fooleries.
Russell Seitz asks why I have not had a peer-reviewed paper published. But I can find no record of his having asked Al Gore that question. If he cannot actually argue against the simple concepts I have outlined in the head-post, let him keep holy silence.
Lady in Red says I have “William Buckley eyes”. The rather fish-eyed look is caused by exophthalmus induced by the residual scar tissue from the former inflammation of the retro-orbital membranes by the infection that I have some reason to believe causes the supposedly “auto-immune” Graves’ Disease. Fortunately, the inflammation is no longer present and Moorfields Eye Hospital has certified that I am one of the not all that common cases in which the disease – normally chronic – has remitted. The scar-tissue will gradually break down and relieve the pressure on the eyes, which are already noticeably less obtrusive than they were three or four years ago. Some further improvement is expected over the next year or two, but this particular sequela of Graves’ Disease will probably not disappear altogether, even though the disease has done so. Test on the agent which we believe may have caused this remission continue quietly.
Marcus McSpartacus,
Exactly right. If the alarmist contingent had the facts on their side, they wouldn’t be bothering with hairsplitting and nitpicking with these off-topic arguments. It’s all opinion anyway; there has never been a definitive law clarifying the matter. [Lord Monckton does appears to have several arguments in his favor.]
The fact is that the demonizing of “carbon” by the alarmist crowd is being debunked by Planet Earth herself. I, for one, will listen to what the planet is telling us, over what the alarmists want the planet to do. Unfortunately for them, the planet is not cooperating. So they go off on tangents like arguing about the arrangements of chains on a portcullis. Sucks to be that desperate.
R. Gates says:
?>0^0<? (glazed look)
… "Take away CO2, and the Earth goes back to an snowball planet in a fairly short order (less than a century)."…………………….
Please don't bother Christopher Monckton.
R., rest assured that if you take away CO2, all of our worries will be over long before we freeze to death. Try Starvation? If logic applied you would be arguing in favor of more CO2. Non condensing blah blah blah. If CO2 is non condensing, please explain all of the past preaching of the gospel of acid rain that showers the earth with carbonic acid and 'acidifies' the ocean. I guess technically that is dissolution. Scrubbing. What ever. You need to write a unified theory of climate catastrophism that is internally coherently consistent.
In the world I inhabit there is an energy source (The Sun) that heats a vessel (the Earth) driving a process called evaporation of water. This evaporation absorbs energy. This energy(enthalpy) is transported by convection and advection high into the atmosphere of the vessel to a point where the water vapor cools and condenses into the liquid phase again, there by releasing that latent heat of evaporation. That latent heat then radiates out into space from a position above the major portion of atmospheric CO2. It is the phase change of water that allows water to dominate the energy exchange of our planet. Water does Work. It keeps the planet in equilibrium.
Lazy old CO2 on the other hand is a cad. It floats around non-condensingly un-phased. It is not into long term relationships with transient photons of energy, so the dalliances are oh so brief and unfulfilling. But some CO2 gets religion and joins the church of photosynthesis where they get married up with some good wholesome Hydrogen (from Water 😉 ) and form some long term high energy bonds from photons and pretty soon you have Sugar. Now that is a sweet relationship, and a happy ending.
More CO2?… More Sugar!!! (and beer.) That's what I'm talkin' about.
“Myrrh says:
January 16, 2012 at 3:03 pm
Earth with atmosphere as is: 15°C
Earth without any atmosphere: -18°C”
Please see the following where this is questioned:
http://climatechangedispatch.com/home/9799-that-bogus-greenhouse-gas-whatchamacallit-effect
“Dr. Latour is one of many experts old enough to remember that in 1981 James Hansen stated the average thermal T (temperature) at Earth’s surface is 15°C (ok) and Earth radiates to space at -18°C (ok). From that he declared the difference 15° – (-18°) = 33°C (arithmetic ok) to be the famous greenhouse gas effect.
This is not ‘ok’ to more astute analysts critical of Hansen’s number fudging. They say Hansen’s math is very seriously awry because there is no physics to connect these two dissimilar numbers.”
Joel Shore says: January 16, 2012 at 10:33 am
“CO2 levels control water vapor levels (through their control of the temperature),”
This is wrong:
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2007/2007JD008431.shtml
The paper says:
“the carbon cycle is essentially driven by solar energy via the water cycle intermediary.”
Governments should shut down the UNFCCC? Absolutely.
Governments should shut down the IPCC? Fast!
Cut climate funding by at least nine-tenths? True.
De-fund all but two or three computer models of the climate? Correct.
Get back to addressing the real problems of the world? So true.
Five out of five Christopher. Give the gentleman an A+.
It’s preposterous to treat water vapor as a feedback, with CO2 as the sensitive trigger. Water vapor is 40,000 ppm in tha atmosphere, and varies much more than the CO2 change in question, and absorbs across a much broader spectrum. If the feedbacks were so amplifying, the fluctuations in water vapor would spiral out of control.
I wish that these people who have such faith in their climate models (ultra-simplifications of the real climate, with numerous and arbitrary assumptions, and no real way to test it by designed experiment) would first prove that they can model even simple chemical processes.
Complex models of reactors–that are based mostly on first-principals, with constants tuned by well-tested carefully designed experiments–can perform very well to predict a reactor’s performance in its normal range. THEN, you introduce a new batch of feedstock, even one that chemical analysis can detect no signifcant differences in from the last batch, and the model’s predictive power can go haywire. New constants have to be determined, and new calibrations.
With the poor temperature record, and the continual “corrections,” splicing (by other names), assumptions, biases, etc., and the still-simple models whose predictions are all over the board– even suggesting that the water vapor has a positive (amplifying) vs. a negative (dampening) feedback is just a wild guess. Given the remarkable stability of our planet’s temperature, I would speculate it dampens.
By the way, “forcings,” as discussed in the IPCC reports, are pseudo science. They pose as first-principal realities, but they are entirely empirical–or worse than empirical, since they are based on arbitrary assumptions about what has caused the poorly-measured 0.8C temperature rise of the past century.
Well I don’t think so,
If all or most of the water vapor precipitated out of the atmosphere, there would be no clouds to speak of, and the Earth albedo would plummet, and you would have the mother of all positive forcings, in that the amount of solar energy that reached the earth surface without being captured by H2O in the atmosphere would sky rocket.
Every single molecule of H2O or Ozone, or CO2 in the atmosphere can and will intercept some portion of the solar spectrum incoming energy. So that solar spectrum energy will never reach the surface and be stored mostly in the deep oceans, and the rocks and vegetation.
Yes it will warm the atmosphere, which will then radiate at LWIR wavelengths, but also isotropically, so half of it is lost to space, and only half can reach the surface. That is still a net loss of solar energy from the surface. And the downward LWIR radiation is mostly absorbed in the top 50 microns of any water body; it does not propagate to the depths, except by conduction which is slow compared to the prompt evaporation it causes by heating the surface layer so that the high energy end of the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution of molecular energies in the surface will escape in the form of evaporation; or sublimation in the case of an ice surface. That results in cooling the surface; not warming it, since the mean kinetic energy of the remaining moleculesin the liquid surface is lower.
Yes H2O in the atmosphere IS a green house gas; but it warms the atmosphere; not the deep oceans. The cloud albedo modulation is likely an even larger negative feedback regulating mechanism.
“”””” Joel Shore says:
January 16, 2012 at 11:06 am
Monckton of Brenchley says:
I have many concerns about this paper, which – for instance – takes no account of the fact that evaporation from the surface occurs at thrice the rate imagined by computer models (Wentz et al., 2007). So there would be a good deal more water vapor in the atmosphere even without greenhouse gases than the models assume.
This statement is incorrect. What they showed is that the INCREASE in the evaporation with increasing temperatures has been three times what is observed. In particular (as I recall), that the models predicted evaporation to go up by ~2.3% whereas measurements suggest that it went up by about 7%. “””””
“”””” What they showed is that the INCREASE in the evaporation with increasing temperatures has been three times what is observed. “””””
“”””” has been three times what is observed. “””””
Come now Joel is the increase in evaporation the amount that is (was) observed, or is it three times the amount that was (is observed). I suggest that the increase in evaporation was exactly equal to what is (was observed).
And there was no dispute between the observed (actual real world) and calculated, and not bloody likely since that is simply the Clausius-Clapeyron calculation. Then it is axiomatic that precipitation and evaporation must balance, in order for the oceans to not end up overhead.
So deltaevap = deltaprecip = 7% per deg C rise is what Wentz et al observed, and also what the GCMs predict; no disagreement. The disagreement was in total atmospheric water content, which was observed to also increase 7% but the models say 1% to 3%, so as much as seven times less than what experimental observations gave.
So the error in the models from observed results is not a factor of three, but as much as a factor of seven.
“Dr. Lacis’ argument, then, is that the radiative forcing from water vapor should be treated as a feedback, because if all greenhouse gases were removed from the atmosphere most of the water vapor now in the atmosphere would condense or precipitate out within ten years…”
I wonder what Dr Lacis would predict regarding the non condensing GH gases, if all the condensing ones were removed.
Werner Brozek says:
January 16, 2012 at 4:38 pm
“Myrrh says:
January 16, 2012 at 3:03 pm
Earth with atmosphere as is: 15°C
Earth without any atmosphere: -18°C”
Please see the following where this is questioned:
http://climatechangedispatch.com/home/9799-that-bogus-greenhouse-gas-whatchamacallit-effect
“Dr. Latour is one of many experts old enough to remember that in 1981 James Hansen stated the average thermal T (temperature) at Earth’s surface is 15°C (ok) and Earth radiates to space at -18°C (ok). From that he declared the difference 15° – (-18°) = 33°C (arithmetic ok) to be the famous greenhouse gas effect.
This is not ‘ok’ to more astute analysts critical of Hansen’s number fudging. They say Hansen’s math is very seriously awry because there is no physics to connect these two dissimilar numbers.”
=========================
Werner – Yes I’ve read it. There’s a difference between there being no science to connect these numbers by Hansen claiming the difference is the warming created by greenhouse gases, and the numbers themselves which Latour OK’s.
In fact, I posted something on that to him, just trying to remember where…, it’s late and way past my bedtime,
Here goes: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/12/earths-baseline-black-body-model-a-damn-hard-problem/#comment-863856
It’s in the same post as I replied to davidmhoffer, skip past that, I was annoyed with him.., and you come to:
In other words, the numbers I gave which Latour OK’s are the bog standard ones, what Hansen has done is just excised the one given for the Earth with atmosphere but without water – the 67°C – and pretended that the difference didn’t come via it, and, Latour’s point, doesn’t produce any physics to connect the -18°C to the 15°C, there’s no physics to explain that number difference of 33°C, just Hansen claiming it’s greenhouse gas warming.
It’s now getting harder to find all these numbers in references, but applied scientists still know them. I first heard about the 67°C temp without the water cycle on a programme about the Hawaiian islands, the geologist explaining the water cycle there, which is beautifully dramatic with all the waterfalls, gave it. It was still on the wiki page when I last looked… 🙂
Perhaps I should have posted to him separately, now I’m not sure he saw it as I didn’t get a reply. Anyway, all I’m pointing out is the trick, the sleight of hand Hansen does with them.
===================================
And maybe this should be in a sepate post…, but thanks cohenite
cohenite says:
January 16, 2012 at 4:53 pm
Joel Shore says: January 16, 2012 at 10:33 am
“CO2 levels control water vapor levels (through their control of the temperature),”
This is wrong:
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2007/2007JD008431.shtml
The paper says:
“the carbon cycle is essentially driven by solar energy via the water cycle intermediary.”
Thanks for finding that. Again, like the real numbers for temps, it shows that carbon dioxide is understood to be fully part of the Water Cycle, as I posted above. It’s just from those pushing ‘climatology’ that it’s missing.. 🙂
Gina Becker (Jan. 16, 2012 at 5:41 pm):
As I frame my own position on the pseudo-scientific nature of the “forcings,” supposedly a “forcing” causes the equilibrium temperature at Earth’s surface to rise by a specified amount. However, the equilibrium temperature is not an observable feature of the real world. Thus, the conjecture that a given forcing “forces” the equilibrium temperature to rise by a specified amount is non-falsifiable thus lying outside science. In the sense that many climatologists represent this conjecture to be “scientific,” it is a “pseudo-scientific” conjecture. Like many a climatologist, Lord Monckton takes this pseudo-scientific conjecture to be a scientific conjecture, choosing only to contest the magnitude of the increase in the equilibrium temperature from the forcing.
Joel Shore saID January 16, 2012 at 11:06 am:
Furthermore, the basic idea of the water vapor feedback follows from quite general physics principles (the saturation vapor pressure for water is a rapidly increasing function of temperature and, as a result, the rate of evaporation increases strongly with temperature). And, the water vapor feedback also now has considerable empirical support for both its existence and approximate magnitude. (See, for example, http://www.sciencemag.org/content/323/5917/1020.summary )
“the saturation vapor pressure for water is a rapidly increasing function of temperature” sounds a lot like the Clausius-Clapeyron relationship. That describes the equilibrium condition, not “the rate of evaporation”.
iANm
In his post of Jan. 16, 2012, Monckton of Brenchley asserts that “…all I am doing is to take the concepts and data and methods of the IPCC and its adherents and to draw logical conclusions from them.” Monckton’s assertion is refuted by the fact that one cannot draw a logical conclusion from an illogical premise. In particular, one cannot draw a logical conclusion from the scientifically illogical premise that an increase in the atmospheric CO2 concentration causes the equilibrium temperature at Earth’s surface to rise. This premise can be identified as scientifically illogical because it is insusceptible to being tested by reference to instrument readings, the equilibrium temperature being not an observable feature of the real world. Monckton’s assertion that the magnitude of the climate sensitivity is lower than claimed by the IPCC is illogical and unscientific for the same reason.
The case that the IPCC’s argument for CAGW is unfounded has to be argued from the illegitimacy of the equilibrium climate sensitivity as a concept. I hope Lord Monckton will join me in making this argument.
If all the fossil fuel deposits discovered so far are doubled, and all extracted and burned at the current rates of increase and or availabilty as they are exhausted, then by the year 2100 the CO2 level would not reach 712 ppm.
Terry Oldberg says:
January 16, 2012 at 9:31 pm
Terry, did you just say that CO2 causing warming has not been confirmed? And this refutes Moncton’s conclusions about sensitivity?
Terry Oldberg says:
January 16, 2012 at 8:19 pm
“However, the equilibrium temperature is not an observable feature of the real world. Thus, the conjecture that a given forcing “forces” the equilibrium temperature to rise by a specified amount is non-falsifiable thus lying outside science. In the sense that many climatologists represent this conjecture to be “scientific,” it is a “pseudo-scientific” conjecture. Like many a climatologist, Lord Monckton takes this pseudo-scientific conjecture to be a scientific conjecture, choosing only to contest the magnitude of the increase in the equilibrium temperature from the forcing”.
The good Lord Monckton of Benchley was quite explicit in saying ” I propose to apply the IPCC/GISS central estimates of forcing, feedbacks, and warming to what has actually been observed or inferred in the period since 1750″.
He did not say he accepted anything about the IPCC’s AGW theory, but uses a scientific method of calculating the conclusion based on the IPCC premises.
So your argument is made from a false premiss, being “Monckton’s assertion that the magnitude of the climate sensitivity is lower than claimed by the IPCC is illogical and unscientific for the same reason”. A truer premise is “Monckton’s assertion that the magnitude of the climate sensitivity is lower than claimed by the IPCC using their own reasoning”. I’m often a lazy reader as well Terry.
But, your statement ” The case that the IPCC’s argument for CAGW is unfounded has to be argued from the illegitimacy of the equilibrium climate sensitivity as a concept. I hope Lord Monckton will join me in making this argument”, is a premise I’d subscribe to wholeheartedly.
Now get out of here before Christopher gets back and gives you a intellectual smack.
As to the residence time of CO2 in the atmosphere, which is irrelevent anyhow, we have measured observational evidence (data) showing that over the entire arctic, the atmospheric CO2 varies by 18 ppm peak to peak, each and every year. That is 4.6% of its mean value of 390 ppm.
And it drops by that 18 ppm in just five months, and then returns in the next seven months.
So if we presume that the present value is 110 ppm higher than the long term pre-SUV value of 280 ppm, that 110 ppm would disppear in 110/18 x 5 months or 30.5 months; 2 1/2 years.
Now that is the initial rate of decline, and so that would be the time constant, if the decline follows an exponential decay, so 90% would be gone in htree times constants or 7.5 years, and 99% in five or 12 1/2 years.
So nutz to the 200 year residence time, the natural processes can erase 110 ppm in a very short time.
And yes; both CO2 and H2O are PERMANENT components of the atmosphere, and nobody ever checks for serial number on the molecules.
JFD says:
January 15, 2012 at 8:55 pm
The production of ground water from no or slow to recharge aquifers amounts to 900 cubic kilometers per year. This is “new” water that takes one cycle of the hydrological cycle to come to equilibrium with the “old” water. This new water, frequently called fossil water, accounts for 2.6mm increase in ocean levels each year. Currently no one, including Deniers, seems to understand this aspect of human activities.
——————
And to think the only person on earth to understand is right here at WUWT to enlighten “Deniers”. BTW when was your peer reviewed research published? I need to get up to speed.
RE: markus:(January 16, 2012 at 1:58 am)
“a standard program-favored number that I use”
The operational hypothesis is that the Earth is required to have a constant outgoing energy flow as observed at the top of the atmosphere. I made an estimate based on lunar albedo for such a flow. It turns out that MODTRAN only returns special values—you will *never* get a result of 293.000 W/m², no matter how fine you adjust your offset temperature. So I have picked 292.993 W/m² as my standard value for the energy flow that I require at the top of the atmosphere in the tropical region.
This allows me to use this program to find ground temperatures forced by this standard flow requirement for various greenhouse gas concentrations. I have limited these estimates to clear tropical air as I believe this to be most representative of the raw effect of these changes since most of the Earth’s energy exchange occurs over that region. Due to the nature of this program, no climatic feedback effects are included in these ‘raw’ estimates.
RE: Bomber_the_Cat says:
January 16, 2012 at 2:21 pm
“Spector, what exactly do you expect to see here with your model? The amount of radiation leaving the Earth will always equal the amount being received from the Sun. Doubling the level of CO2, or anything else for that matter, will not change that. This is called the radiation balance, which applies at the top the atmosphere. Energy in must equal energy out . So what point are you trying to make? ( Jim D take note )
“However, we do not live at the top of the atmosphere, we live on the planet’s surface. The greenhouse gases cause the surface to be warmer than it otherwise would be without them.”
I believe these calculations are for the same ground temperature in each case: 288.2 deg K. This plot indicates that only a minor change in forcing is produced if the CO2 content is doubled when the ground temperature is 288.2 deg K ( 15 deg C). This is, in effect, an ‘open-loop’ calculation. From what I have written just above, it takes some hunt-and-seek effort to find a temperature that gives exactly the same outgoing energy as another condition and then this temperature is the result of the search, not the known standard constant energy flow at the top of the atmosphere.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ModtranRadiativeForcingDoubleCO2.png